Life can just be ridiculous. I mean, it's great, too, don't get me wrong, but no matter how hard you try, you can't prepare for everything. That includes the good and the bad. I was sitting here, just languishing in the notion that I have a three-day weekend, and it hit me, as the dark thoughts do, enveloping my brain like a tree with the knotty roots that seem to be beckoning the tree to the dirt, I am a 35 (nearly 36) year-old with no grand plan.
In thinking about it a lot in the last few months, maybe a grand plan is not so smart. The world, our country even, is filled with uncertainty and indecision; hell, the government can't agree, so why should I be having anxiety attacks over my personal life? I'm not, actually. I think I can count my anxiety attacks on one hand, one involving IKEA. It just made me dizzy, as did their "instructions" on products, which consist (or did) of some bizarre graphs and then a rudimentary drawing, at best, of a really long telephone line leading back to IKEA. Are there no cordless phones in Sweden? I digress.....
I honestly cannot wrap my head around all the things I've lost in the last four years, and I guess it doesn't matter all that much, except that I keep thinking that you have no idea when life can turn on a dime. I remember Baz Luhrmann, the director (Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby) came out with a bizarre spoken song in the early '00s called "Wear Sunscreen," and one of the lines that has always stuck with me was " The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday."
My father died on a Monday morning, and it wasn't unexpected completely, but the fact that when we thought it would happen, and waited and waited, and it didn't, until his stubborn ass was ready to go prove those song lyrics. The slap in the face of my separation leading to pending divorce (?) took me completely by surprise. It happened on a Friday afternoon, and to say that I was not expecting it would be akin to my saying Pearl Harbor was a little surprised.
I don't know what my point is; I often have no point. Oh yeah, maybe this at least resembles a point. I never thought any of the bad things that have happened to me in the last few years would happen. Well, duh, why would I have? However, I also would have never thought that I would live for my nieces and nephew and great-nephew. When I was in high school, I eschewed children, thinking I would never want to have children, and the little irony upon me now is that I ACHE for children, but I'm not in a position to do that right now. I love that modern medicine hasn't closed that window for me, but I am also mindful that God and nature have their own ideas, too.
I think, now, in my pre-mid life, I want to rediscover life and the family I have that I was too self-involved to engage before. I want to reach out to my dad's friends...I may even have a tentative book idea, and experience parts of his life that I didn't know. I think sometimes it takes a lot of irritation to make pearls...oh, wait, the oysters have the market on that. Too bad, I have thumbs; I call dibs.
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